Is MP3 about to become obsolete?

In a word "no".

But if I didn't write BOLD headlines, would you even be reading this?

Wired's Listening Post has a really interesting post up about a new type of music reproduction/digital compression.
Unlike MP3 it doesn't work as a way of compressing and sampling actual sound, but as a way of reproducing the performance of the original. So really, in a way, I was being even MORE misleading with my post title, as this isn't so much competition for MP3 as it might be for MIDI.

So? We've been using MIDI for a while. What's the big the deal?

Well, checking out the samples on the post, the research team (using an actual recording of a clarinet) has been able to create a MIDI-like recreation of the clarinet, (which would normally be around 32KB
in MIDI), but with this new method takes up less than ONE kilobyte (1KB).

For those of you like me, who weren't math majors, that's less than ONE THIRTIETH the file size!

Check out the post, with samples to listen to, over at Wired!
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